Florida’s latest e-voting crisis likely due to human error

In Florida's latest electoral snafu, a shortfall of nearly 3,500 ballots may …

At first, it seemed like just the latest in Florida's longstring of votingmachinemisadventures: almost 3,500 optical scan ballots appeared to have vanished between last week's photo-finish election for a seat on the state's 15th Circuit Court and a recount on different machines—yielding a different result—that was completed over the weekend. But a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board now tells Ars Technica that the fault may lie not in the scanners, but in the humans: as of midnight Thursday, a hand count of the paper ballots had turned up some 2,700 that never made it to the recount machines.

The initial tally in the Palm Beach County election, held on new Sequoia Voting Systems optical-scan machines, had given challenger William Abramson a 17-vote edge over incumbent Judge Richard Wennet. But in the recount over the weekend, a different set of high-speed ballot scanners yielded a 60-vote victory for Wennet—and a shortfall of 3,478 ballots cast, compared to the first count. An irked Abramson almost immediately threatened to sue.

In an interview with Ars Technica, however, board spokeswoman Kathy Adams revealed that officials had been retallying the ballots—the number of sheets, not the results—by hand, in an attempt to explain the discrepancy. By Wednesday evening, they had already turned up approximately 2,700 ballots that appeared never to have been fed into the high-speed scanners used in the recount.

Initial reports had suggested that the difference in tallies may have resulted from the more "unforgiving" machines employed in the recount. Because the high-speed scanners are more sensitive, they are more likely to reject problematic ballots. But according to Adams, the uncounted ballots were never scanned a second time at all, possibly as a result of error by workers at the recount tabulation site.

Officials will determine how to proceed at a canvassing board meeting scheduled for Thursday afternoon. Since the state has not yet certified the results of the discrepant recount, the board could decide to simply "continue" the recount, either by scanning the errant ballots now or starting the tabulation over from scratch.